System Shock: Remake Development Suspened

Two years ago, Night Dive studio shared gameplay footage of a remake for the 1994 first-person RPG, System Shock. It was a massive hit with fans, garnering almost half a million views on Youtube and a successful Kickstarter campaign.

Since then, the team behind the title has been considerably quiet on the development – and as with many Kickstarter campaigns – it had seemed that this project had fizzled out. Now we have finally had contact with the team through a blog post from the CEO, who has revealed the project is, unfortunately, on hiatus.

He took full responsibility for the situation, stating that one of the major problems was that the development started to veer further away from the initial ideation of the project just being a remaster.

‘Maybe we were too successful. Maybe we lost our focus. The vision began to change. We moved from a Remaster to a completely new game. We shifted engines from Unity to Unreal, a choice that we don’t regret and one that has worked out for us. With the switch we began envisioning doing more, but straying from the core concepts of the original title.

As our concept grew and as our team changed, so did the scope of what we were doing and with that the budget for the game. As the budget grew, we began a long series of conversations with potential publishing partners. The more that we worked on the game, the more that we wanted to do, and the further we got from the original concepts that made System Shock so great.’

We went on to state that the team has been put on hiatus until they can return to the initial ideology of the remaster.

System Shock’s release date was originally set to release either this year or in 2019 – the release now, remains unclear.